Things in LA are shinier and better looking than pretty much the rest of the world, and a shiny place full of really, really good looking famous people calls for a photographer who’s going to immortalise them properly. Luckily Emily Shur is really good at capturing the stars of LA with a sheen that is at once humorous and also incredibly flattering. Her portraits tend to be hi-octane shots that have obviously taken a while to set up, and then edit, to show the subject almost as they would be expected to appear on the silver screen. The more commercial shots (Will Ferrell in a fur coat) are juxtaposed nicely with candid gems such as the portrait of Neko Case with a horse or Adrien Brody grinning cheekily through some railings.

Having briefly mentioned Craig Gibson in our round up of the Photographers’ Gallery’s Fresh-Faced + Wild-Eyed show, we felt the Scottish photographer deserved a little bit more attention. Born After Birth is a project that explores the mysterious world of adult baptism in the Baptist Church community. Craig succeeds in taking a relatively weighty subject and presenting it in an accessible way. The imagery is documented sincerely avoiding dramatising what he sees. Craig also printed the series as an A5 zine, which gives the project a different dimension and alludes to the privacy within this concealed part of society by containing it in a small, hand-held object.

“Inspiration comes from cinema and cinematic photographers,” Nadia Lee Cohen, the 24-year-old photographer whose vibrant pseudo-sinister work has been ricocheting around the internet of late, tells us. “Anything focusing around suburbia with dark undertones usually has me sold.”

Conor’s a man of tradition, albeit those very strange, very British traditions that so many photographers find irresistible. The last time we featured his work, he had been catching up with the good people of the brilliantly named West Country town of Ottery St Mary, who have a penchant for setting fire to barrels full of tar. Now, he’s turned his attention to the less pyrotechnic but just as odd tradition of Swan Upping, the ceremony of checking and counting the Queen’s swans along the Thames. As many are aware, not only can swans break a man’s arm simply by looking at it (unverified), they are also all the property of the Queen.

Made lunch plans for today? I’d cancel them, if I were you, and instead dedicate an hour at midday to perusing the brand new issue of Accent Magazine. A biannual photography journal compiled by Lydia Garnett and Lucy Nurnberg, issue #9 of Accent Magazine showcases Julie Hascoët’s series Battre la Campagne – a collection images documenting the free-party movement which began almost 30 years ago, and which “was spearheaded by British music collective Spiral Tribe,” Julie explains. “In the early 90s, the culture grew steadily from its birthplace in southern England to Europe and North America, attracting travellers, nomads and free spirits along from all around the world.

There’s nothing quite like the first dip of summer in an outdoor swimming pool with the undulating waves lapping against your shins as you sit anchored to the tiled side. Capturing this shared experience is French photographer Karine Laval with her series The Pool, taken at swimming pools throughout Europe. The initial draw for Karine was the idea that swimming pools and beach resorts are a combination of the natural and the artificial: “They represent a dominant theme of modern life in our culture and mix the natural element of water with the culture and social element of a manmade environment,” she explains.

For one week every year, Nevada’s windswept Black Rock Desert is descended upon by over 65,000 revellers for Burning Man festival. Something of a massive social experiment, the festival built around ideas of community, art, gift-giving and what is called “radical self-reliance” takes its name from the ritualistic burning of a towering wooden effigy on the Saturday night. In its simplest incarnation, Burning Man is a seven-day desert rave where, blinded by dust and no doubt half-delirious from the sun, festival-goers erect a makeshift city for a surreal week of madness. But it is also host to a number of strange and fantastic happenings and site-specific installations and sculpture, including a mechanised fire-breathing octopus, lofty wooden temples standing 15 metres tall and the eponymous Man himself.